Sunday, August 23, 2015

WiFi + Train + Google Location = weird

For some while now, the Austrian Railways (OeBB) offer free Wifi at least on their premium trains ("railjet"). The trains are good and fast, the Wifi (most of the time, at least in Austria) is good, but it confuses the heck out of the Google/Android location services.
The trains operate all the routes from Zürich to Vienna, from Munich to Budapest, from Graz to Prague, etc etc.

And it seems that Google (and Apple as well) associate various geo coordinates to those access points, On my route from Vienna to Salzburg, both my iPad and my Nexus 5 "re-located" me to Graz, Linz and Prague, while I actually was just around Salzburg.

(For the convenience of readers outside Central Europe I include the map as a reference for the screw-up)

There must be some way to report those access points to Google so they exclude them from location services. The concept of mobile hotspots/access points should be too common.